Posted on 03/05/2008 8:05:41 AM PST by SmithL
Or more accurately, God is mutating. Changing. In flux. Becoming perhaps slightly less appealing as a dogmatic force of rigid closed-minded sit-down-and-shut-up paternal scowling and becoming perhaps more fluid, interesting, dynamic, unspecified, something you actually want to take into your heart and into your mouth and lick until you find the rich, creamy center and then define that taste for yourself, blissfully independent of what your parents or priest or president tells you, until you reach that point of deeper knowing where you can't help but go a-ha.
It's all part of that big new study from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, released just recently and ripe and ready to be spun a thousand different ways, the one that contains the big whopper of a statistic that says 28 percent of Americans have abandoned the religion they grew up with and have taken up another one, or none at all, or maybe more than one because polytheism certainly sounds tasty and, you know, what the hell, right?
It's not really all that shocking. People change religions. People swap denominations. People evolve, go to college, learn to think (and seek meaning) for themselves, change their minds or marry someone of a different belief or go through a personal revelation, or actually experience the spiritual/intellectual epiphany that reveals how all religions are one and God is not "out there" and you are not here to be its meek sinful guilty mindless servant.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
You've been warned.
Reading a Morford column is like trying to go back into your mind to try and recall the worst writing you have ever read, writing so bad that you wanted to luxuriate in its awfulness the way you luxuriate in the pain of a long workout knowing that you will soon descend into the blissful release of a bubbling and spraying Jacuzzi with a little wet bar by the side of it so you can fix yourself a julep just the way you like it with Makers Mark and a little crumbly brown sugar that washes the tiredness and strain away, the awfulness in which you completely lose your train of thought as you go off on some barely-disguised personal tangent that has nothing to do with the awfulness of the writing or its topic, the awfulness of the tedium of being trapped in a world of endless self-referentiality that meanders around an unvarying set of preeestablished tropes that are trundled out every time you try to express yourself as other humans do, those other humans who are able to stick to a topic and write concisely and rationally about it, going from a premise to a conclusion without torturing the reader with telegraphed soddenness intended as comic relief.
This particular article was written by an idiot who is also being dishonest.
But there are some interesting things in the actual study.
There are two big trends, evangelicals are making up a larger percentage of Christians and More Catholics leave their denomination than any other but a very high percentage of immigrants are Catholic so it balances out.
Some people are taking the Obamatrain derailing way too seriously.
College is where you learn to be a left wing lemming. It takes a few more years of actually living in the world before, let's hope, you learn to think for yourself.
so we can have "good" Catholics thinking that abortion really isn't that bad because that really isn't a baby .
so we can have church attending Bible thumping conservatives who also will look at you point blank and tell you that "Hooters" is a "family" restaurant....
Ecumenicalism is a big thing in modern science fiction. Probably a combination of the traditional fascination with ‘more inclusive’ Eastern religions and the recent attempts to not be so hostile toward Christianity.
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